It is what Thomas Jefferson warned us about in 1816: “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”

In the 1860s, in the midst of the rebuilding of Paris under Napoleon III and the Baron Haussmann, Charles Baudelaire presented a memorable portrait of the flâneur as the artist-poet of the modern metropolis:
The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not—to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.
—Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life", (New York: Da Capo Press, 1964). Orig. published in Le Figaro, in 1863.

They have made Radha queen, in the beautiful
groves of Vrindaban.
At her gate stands Krishna, on guard.
His flute is singing all the time:
Radha is about to distribute infinite wealth of love.
Though I am guard, all the world may enter.
Come all ye who thirst! Say only 'Glory unto Radha!'
Enter the region of love!


That was a great hour indeed when he spoke of Buddha; for, catching a word that seemed to
identify him with its anti—Brahminical spirit, an uncomprehending listener said, "Why,
Swami, I did not know that you were a Buddhist!
"Madam", he said, rounding on her, his whole face aglow with the inspiration of that name, "I
am the servant of the servants of the servants of Buddha. Who was there ever like him? — the
Lord — who never performed one action for himself — with a heart that embraced the whole
world! So full of pity that he — prince and monk — would give his life to save a little goat! So
loving that he sacrificed himself to the hunger of a tigress! — to the hospitality of a pariah and
blessed him! And he came into my room when I was a boy and I fell at his feet! For I knew it
was the Lord Himself!

There is nothing for modern man to return to. Our wonderful time in the wilderness had given us a taste of what man had abandoned and what mankind was still trying to get even further away from. Progress today can be defined as man's ability to complicate simplicity. Nothing in all the procedure that modern man, helped by all his modern middlemen, goes through before he earns money to buy a fish or a potato will ever be as simple as pulling it out of the water or soil. Without the farmer and the fisherman, modern society would collapse, with all its shops and pipes and wires. The farmers and the fishermen represent the nobility of modern society; they share their crumbs with the rest of us, who run about with papers and screwdrivers attempting to build a better world without a blueprint.

| Thor Heyerdahl

"Existence can never be non-existence, neither can non-existence ever become
existence. ... Know, therefore, that that which pervades all this universe is
without beginning or end. It is unchangeable. There is nothing in the universe
that can change [the Changeless]. Though this body has its beginning and end,
the dweller in the body is infinite and without end." (Ibid. 16-18.)


Knowing this, stand up and fight! Not one step back, that is the idea. ... Fight it
out, whatever comes. Let the stars move from the sphere! Let the whole world
stand against us! Death means only a change of garment. What of it? Thus
fight! You gain nothing by becoming cowards. ... Taking a step backward, you
do not avoid any misfortune. You have cried to all the gods in the world. Has
misery ceased? The masses in India cry to sixty million gods, and still die like
dogs. Where are these gods? ... The gods come to help you when you have
succeeded. So what is the use? Die game. ... This bending the knee to
superstitions, this selling yourself to your own mind does not befit you, my
soul. You are infinite, deathless, birthless. Because you are infinite spirit, it
does not befit you to be a slave. ... Arise! Awake! Stand up and fight! Die if
you must. There is none to help you. You are all the world. Who can help you?



"As the tortoise can draw in his legs, and if you strike him, not one foot comes
out, even so the sage can draw all his sense-organs inside," (Ibid. 58.) and
nothing can force them out. Nothing can shake him, no temptation or anything.
Let the universe tumble about him, it does not make one single ripple in his
mind.




Vivekananda

There are certain works which are, as it were, the aggregate, the sum total, of a
large number of smaller works. If we stand near the seashore and hear the
waves dashing against the shingle, we think it is such a great noise, and yet we
know that one wave is really composed of millions and millions of minute
waves. Each one of these is making a noise, and yet we do not catch it; it is
only when they become the big aggregate that we hear. Similarly, every
pulsation of the heart is work.



The majority of us cannot see beyond a few years, just as
some animals cannot see beyond a few steps. Just a little narrow circle — that
is our world. We have not the patience to look beyond, and thus become
immoral and wicked. This is our weakness, our powerlessness.


There arises a difficult question in this ideal of work. Intense activity is
necessary; we must always work. We cannot live a minute without work. What
then becomes of rest? Here is one side of the life-struggle — work, in which we
are whirled rapidly round. And here is the other — that of calm, retiring
renunciation: everything is peaceful around, there is very little of noise and
show, only nature with her animals and flowers and mountains. Neither of them
is a perfect picture. A man used to solitude, if brought in contact with the
surging whirlpool of the world, will be crushed by it; just as the fish that lives
in the deep sea water, as soon as it is brought to the surface, breaks into pieces,
deprived of the weight of water on it that had kept it together. Can a man who
has been used to the turmoil and the rush of life live at ease if he comes to a
quiet place? He suffers and perchance may lose his mind. The ideal man is he
who, in the midst of the greatest silence and solitude, finds the intensest
activity, and in the midst of the intensest activity finds the silence and solitude
of the desert. He has learnt the secret of restraint, he has controlled himself. He
goes through the streets of a big city with all its traffic, and his mind is as calm
as if he were in a cave, where not a sound could reach him; and he is intensely
working all the time. That is the ideal of Karma-Yoga




Vivekananda
Yoga Works. Vol. 1

'The elation and the excitement of the previous night had
burnt away, and a chilling reaction followed. I was very
hungry, for I had had no dinner before starting, and choco
late, though it sustains, does not satisfy. I had scarcely slept,
but yet my heart beat so fiercely and I was so nervous and
perplexed about the future that I could not rest. I thought
of all the chances that lay against me; I dreaded and de
tested more than words can express the prospect of being
caught and dragged back to Pretoria. I found no comfort in
any of the philosophical ideas which some men parade in
their hours of ease and strength and safety. They seemed
only fair-weather friends. I realised with awful force that no
exercise of my own feeble wit and strength could save me
from my enemies, and that without the assistance of that
High Power which interferes in the eternal sequence of
causes and effects more often than we are always prone to
admit, I could never succeed. I prayed long and earnestly
for help and guidance. My prayer, as it seems to me, was
swiftly and wonderfully answered.'

| Winston Churchill
Roving Commission
My Early Life